Tuesday, March 31, 2009

This is a recipe that I make a a little different each time and you can do it with all kinds of fruit. The following is a basic version that includes the ingredients I consider most essential, just remember if you change the fruit, you might need to change the sorts of spices or other sweeteners you use in order to get a balance. This preparation will give you great soothing energy. It is delicious and speaks directly to your body. I started creating variations of this while in Peru traveling in the Amazon basin. None of the foods in it need refrigeration or cooking and it can be done with a knife, fork and spoon which is all I had to use. It was the perfect food to recharge the whole bodymind after a strenuous night.

Mash it all together, being sure to spread the coconut oil among the other ingredients.

The fat source is very important, especially if you've been taxing your mind adventuring. Sub avocado for coconut oil, maybe even Durian fruit. No Mangos?? No problem, lose 'em altogether or try some papaya, cherries, bluberries, strawberries. Most things will work if you adjust the other flavors. Prepare as attentivley as you can in a beautiful piece of glass or ceramic ware and it will bring great life to all those who partake.

Many folks work or go to school and would like to bring their own homemade meals with them. They may prefer the quality of their own foods, the nutrition, the enjoyment we get from feeding ourselves or just don't care to spend extra money on eating out. Sometimes there is no refrigerator or acceptable heating source (see note below) around for them to use while they are working or in class. This is by no means meant to be the final word but does offer some ideas for people who run into this issue. So, here are some food ideas for people with no fridge or heat source!

Energy bars, will keep all day unrefrigerated without any problem. But, just as you would with any food don't leave it in high-heat area or sunlight (in a car during summer for instance).

Salads' ingredients mostly grow in the sun so a few hours in a container aren't going to cause any problem. The thing that goes wrong when left to sit for too long is dressed salads. This isn't the lettuce or carrots or whathaveyou going bad, this is the salt-oil-acid combination in the dressing accelerating the decay of the salad ingredients. The way to deal with this is to pack dressing separate and only dress what you intend to eat. There are a million sorts of salads you can make and that's a conservative number.

To get the best nutrition out of a salad that will transport with you like this, it is helpful if you keep the components in larger pieces. This means that you might prefer chopping less, and shredding less. It also means that you might choose fewer things that you might need to shred, such as raw beets. The more you cut up your produce and let it sit around, the more it oxidizes and loses living energy. Avoid buying pre-shredded produce such as carrots. But, if you want a salad with shredded beets, arugula, raisins and walnuts and you are going to work and you know it will sit around for a few hours. Make it anyway! It will still be good for you, it will still be delicious, just hold the dressing off until you are ready to eat.

One salad that does very well if you dress it in the morning and let it hang out for a a few hours is kale. Raw kale is very tough and tends to tenderize and become more flavorful after it has had time to cure. Try this kale salad! Consider other tough greens for similar uses as well, such as collards or mustard. Another fantastic leafy relative that holds up well is cabbage which can be used in salads or you may consider creating a coleslaw that doesn't use mayo or dairy. Consider a nutcheese, sundried tomato sort of direction, perhaps a tahini... many possibilities. Have a little bit of live sauerkraut!

Some people are worried their food will go bad too quickly, so check this idea out.. Sauerkraut is fermented cabbage, nut cheese is fermented nut-cream, cheese is cultured milk. Leafy greens just sitting in a container don't have the conditions to ferment and will hold up ok as long as the environment is damp. Cooked meat, kept warm and allowed to sit for a while tends to grow the kinds of things that like that environment and which we should avoid. Point here is that good food and bad food is kind of a fuzzy line anyway and lots of the things we love to eat are some kind of controlled rotting process. Knowing a little bit about how this works can help us decide how to create and transport the best foods for these situations.

A lot of your quicker degradation of food quality or ferment has to do with having a lot of sugar mixed with other things, warm and sitting in the sun... I was once told a story about how to make some very quick, cheap moonshine; It involved taking some old donuts at the end of the workday and putting them in a clear plastic bag with some water; Hang this arrangement over a tree limb and wait. Strain it out after about a week and you'll get at least drunk from the contents... probably have some other unpleasant effects.

Soups often keep very well at room temperatures and many of them are very tasty that way as well. Some soups, such as gazpacho and many raw soups are only to be eaten at room temp or even cold. Which of these might work depends upon your tastes as well as the type of soup. Consider a raw carrot ginger soup; this one is very good, but you'll need to reduce the recipe by about 3-4 depending on how much you want to eat. Or yell at me and I'll get to rewriting.

Besides soups, consider stews and chilis. Here's a link with a whole bunch of raw soups http://www.rawbc.org/raw_soups.html or try googling "raw soup recipe" there are more soup recipes than you could make in a lifetime and most raw soups will hold up at room temp for a few hours.

Fruits come in endless variety and are prewrapped to stay fresh (apple, orange, mango, cherry, dried- raisins, figs, dates). If you get tired of one, there is a whole bioregion more of fruits you may not have even tried yet. There are also some vegetables such as carrots, celery, marinatedvegetables in all sorts of sauces, avocados, coconuts, all of which can be eaten on the go. How about some hemp seeds, to toss onto one of those salads you were going to bring? You could pack an apple, some almonds, celery and some soup you had for dinner.

I like to have a steel knife, fork and spoon with me when I'm going to places where I expect to want to eat. These open up all kinds of possibilities like: avocado, olives and a banana. Those three instruments allow you to open, scoop out and mash all sorts of things so you can have a lot of foods fresh anywhere! If you carry a bowl with some coconut oil, cacao, hemp seed, agave already mixed up you could break that out and add a mango or a banana, or both and you would have one of the most delicious, sustaining meals you could dream of in the time it takes to peel the fruit. Check out this fruit mash recipe. Ever just eat whole cacao beans dipped in honey? A few of these and some almonds ooooh! Macadamias! Its fantastic and will keep you going through the middle part of a day without weighing you down; have with an avocado, but be sure to have some leafy greens or fresh fruit later.

Often a good stir-fry or steamed vegetable dish from dinner can be tossed with some brown rice, maybe make some dressing and eat at room temp and still be quite tasty. You could also add some nuts and grated carrot to give it a little bit of a fresher note; hold the dressing until you are ready to eat.

I also find that hummus travels well, bring only a portion though as it will lose freshness going back and forth. Bean dips and other similar foods too. The issue I see many people run into with things like hummus is that they eat it with pita or cornchips and then they feel heavy. Try bringing along some washed lettuce leaves to eat with it instead; try something hardy, romaine perhaps. Have with a few olives, perhaps some carrot spears, maybe a fresh tomato. I like to carry a little bit of sea salt with me for occasions like this, but if you have some good olives you're already there!

Hope you enjoy these suggestions. Please leave a note if you have some other ideas and I'm sure soon more will come to mind.

Best!

*Another possibility if you like warm soups and stews, try getting a thermos or, for cooling only, they make little mini coolers that are just enough space for a lunch.

Note: If you don't know what "acceptable heating" means, I am referring to the microwave, the machine that emits enough high frequency radiation to heat-up frozen TV dinners or transmit telecom data into outer space... Don't heat your food with these things. Don't even stand in the same room with them when they are on. Ever notice how they mess with radio transmission? That is because they are emitting radiation. They damage the chemical constitution of foods causing oxidation, loss of nutrients and the rendering of various components of our meals into toxic waste.. Eat something cold or get a hotplate, find a window and wrap your food in a black blanket! Leave the microwave out of your life!

Chop parsley in uneven manner coarse to fine. I had a lot of stem and decided I wanted to eat them since it all looked so pretty, so I put the stems through a blender, you can do this, or save them for juice or stock. The lower ends of the stems are a little too coarse without processing. Put everything except nuts and seeds into a bowl and mix it up, Macerate the mixture some by stirring aggressively with strong wooden spoon. Add remaining ingredients and test. Adjust as necessary. If the flavor is flat, try sea salt. Yum!

Note for the equipment freaks; Do not put the whole mess in a processor as this will homogenize the pesto into something more like a dip. When it's done it should separate as it sits and you can dig in there with bread or crackers or whathaveyou to get that variety of flavor back out. A pesto isn't really a dip, it's probably more akin to a salsa or chutney in that they all tend to have liquid and solid portions and are generally not completely combined into a smooth paste or cream consistency.

If you want a bit of a cheesy flavor, but want to stay non-dairy, try adding a bit of nutritional yeast and holding back some of the hemp seed. Or if you want cheese, hold the hemp and use Regiano. Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It drives me up the wall! Watching someone spill a drink and then grab a couple of paper towels to sop it up from the floor or table. So imagine if every time someone spilled something, you would go outside, find the nearest tree and hack a limb off... This will never work and it doesn't matter if it's recycled or made of hemp or whathaveyou. There is no need for this. It's just a very wasteful habit created by industry adverts and laziness and it's time for us all to get over it. Paper towels are useful, but in the running of a kitchen you need them for very little and can do without them totally. They cost you money that can be better spent as well.

How to use little to no paper towels and napkins? Pretty easy! Get some dish towels and inexpensive linen napkins. If you have some old bath towels these are fantastic to keep around for bigger disasters. You'll likely rip them in half or thirds to make them more manageable. When something spills reach for an already dirty dish towel or one of the big disaster towels instead of that role of dead tree. When it's soaked, wring it out over the sink and go again. If the stuff you are mopping is staining, then dry and save it for an appropriate laundry load. Your disposable paper usage can be cut to nothing in an instant.

The only thing I use a paper towel for is to wipe my iron pans clean using oil and salt. Even then I tend to use about a quarter of a sheet. Fabric towels can not not be effectively cleaned after this process without unreasonable effort. Everything else is a job for fabric, washable towels. After a little while you will get the hang of it and realize that it is pretty simple. You'll have your new towels, your salty veterans and the lowly floor cleaning towel that you don't like the guests to see. If you don't have a washroom, keep a bucket under the sink to drape the towels over allowing them to dry and you'll never find them mildewed or stinking.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Since I had some dried cornmeal and spelt I tried using them as ingredients in some of what I did. I've decided not to do that anymore. It's tasty, but missing something that seems only to come from baking. I've made some other breads using sprouted buckwheat, sprouted kamut, ground flax, chia seed and various other ingredients. The breads with the sprouted grains are far and above the ones made with ground, dried. I also experimented with using other vegetables such as zuchinni, tomatoes and onions all of which helped to produce a more flexible and tasty bread. The bread made with sprouted grains, but without zuchinni and tomatoes is very good but is more like a thick cracker. I prefer the softer, thin breads and will concentrate on them. I may try making a tortilla chip when fresh corn becomes available. Crackers are no problem.

I've got a Garden Master dehydrator, it's fantastic, but it's round and I'm making breads and crackers so I'm going to look to sell and get an Excalibur 9-tray I believe.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

I bought a Nesco American Harvest dehydrator about a week ago in order to expand the sorts of raw foods I could create into the realm of sprouted live grains in things like breads and crackers. So far I've been experimenting with drying some fruits (cranberries, papaya, peaches), banana bread and crackers. Everything came off pretty well and I've started to understand how this thing works. The crackers were a little too thin and don't form the kind of strong bonds between the many ingredients created by heat and so they broke too easily, though they were pretty good. They had in them:

I realize it may not be of great benefit to use ground grains in this manner, but I had some and thought I might just try it out. It probably added to the crackers breaking so easily. I also realized that the crackers, which start out on a sheet should be flipped to the open screen after a couple of hours in order to speed the drying process, perhaps by many times.

They were a sort of pretty pink color before I put all of the flax seed in the batter and mixed it all together. It's been loaded into the dehydrator along with a bread I've mixed up. The bread is loosely based on another recipe I found here and it has, also in uncertain proportions

I put this mixture through a blender and spread onto paraflex. Many of the recipes I've found don't give you a good idea of how deep the batter should be on the sheet... they give recipe size and say to spread on sheet.. So I assume it isn't that critical or everyone else is using the Excalibur.. I think it's just a matter of getting a good feel for the way it all goes together and perhaps making damn sure what doesn't work... I am beginning to think it may have behooved me to get the Excalibur tray dehydrator. The one I have is very good it seems, but I think that I miscalculated one bit, that is, I would be making a lot of things that would do best on a big rectangular sheet and I've got a round thing with a circle in the middle.. oops! Otherwise I have no complaints, though I may try to sell it and buy an Excalibur.. More on Bread in a while... I just put it in.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Leftovers are a lot more interesting than people often give them opportunity for. Some dishes really don't come into their own until the second or third day, stews for example, some things are just not worth eating the day after and can be a lesson in letting go. I've read in yogic reflections on food, phrases like, "fresh food, freshly prepared" in connection with longer passages on sacredness of body and importance of the spirit which we invest in the foods we eat through giving grace, chewing well and preparing with presence. At the moment when we find ourselves eating leftover salad with soft mushy lettuce soaked in dressing we likely realize the wisdom and simple truth of that statement. But as an artist there is another interpretation to the statement. And to give up on the day-olds simply because we don't think they'll reheat well robs us of a creative possibility.

Often leftovers can be a wonderful set of ingredients for a new soup or stew or as ingredient in some other combination. This can even be done in a way that preserves the sense of freshness by reclassifying that prepared portion as an important part of the flavor of the new dish. The trick is finding the way in which that previously created dish that has now had a night or two to integrate all its own flavors can really contribute something valuable to what you are making. One of the easiest ways that we can see this at work is in the making of soups and stocks. People are often not sure what to do with leftovers and can be equally unclear about soups. Luckily enough these two conundrums solve each other very well.

Never again do you need to reach for bullion, store-bought soup stock or the like! Just open up the fridge and take a look. What do you have? Some fried potatoes? Greenbeans and garlic? stewed tomatoes? some slightly wilted salad greens, half chopped onion, few broccoli spears, chunk of cabbage.... whatever it is, even a soggy salad soaked in dressing, it very well might be a great set of ingredients to saute, chop, blend and combine into a fantastic and often very easily made soup or stock. Great thing about soups is they keep well, travel well, are satisfying and very forgiving in preparation.

Part of learning how to work this skill is to forget for a second what the taste and texture of something might be at that moment and focus more on a couple of other questions: Is it still good? Ignoring some of the textures and look of the thing, just figure whether it has gone bad. is it old, tasteless or moldy? For instance, that soggy salad that was fresh yesterday at lunch, is certainly not bad it's just ugly and icky which leads us to the second question: What's really in it? This icky salad for instance has Romaine lettuce, red onions, garlic, tomatoes, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, thyme, parsley, salt and pepper. What's a vegetable soup stock have in it? Vegetable matter, salt, fat, sugar... Huh... Great! We've got something that once blended will supply some great ingredients for our soup!

Just for starters, here is a bunch of bits that are commonly thrown out that can be saved to make a stock or juice later. There are a lot of perfectly edible bits that happen to be too tough to chew but can be pureed into an edible state. There are a couple of ways of achieving that. One is the old-fashioned way where you put a stock pot on the stove, bring some water to boil and start tossing everything you've got into it with some salt and then simmer that down, sometimes for a couple of hours. I like my food raw or as little cooked as possible so I like to do it one of the two following ways. Most often I take cut the dirty bits off, wash carefully and then run through a very aggressive blender adding water as necessary, leaving a thick, raw puree which I then use as a base. The other way of going involves breaking out a juicer if you've got one and putting whatever you have through there. This option can give you some wonderfully concentrated raw stock from which you can create all sorts of powerful, energizing soups or juices.

Consider holding on to some of these bits by tossing into a bag in the freezer: Asparagus ends. broccoli stalks, Chard Stalks, Cabbage core and outer leaves, half-cut onion you may not get to, Celery butt, avocado pits, wilted lettuces, ugly looking tomatoes and anything else with some edible matter that won't make it as it is.

This is what went into a soup I just put together. I wanted to clear everything that had been forgotten about or left for dead out of the refrigerator and give it either a second life or a farewell! What I found that made the cut for freshness: Raw Kale salad, Raw Cauliflower salad, cooked buckwheat kasha with berbere seasoning, fresh cranberry sauce, brie cheese wedge, chunk of blue cheese, a beat-up summer squash, slightly wilted fresh dill and some raw carrot ginger soup. I found that all of it was still perfectly good, just not very appetizing in its current condition. As a base, I thought about some stems and cuttings I already had from the past week, but then eyed that cauliflower salad.. It had raisins, red onions and garlic among other things.. I didn't want whole raisins in this soup, but thought they would add a nice fruit sweetness, so I had found my base. I put that and the kale salad in the blender with some water and pureed.

I put that puree into the stock pot, added a can of peeled Roma tomatoes, the buckwheat, carrot soup, dill and heated it all up. I generally like to cook my foods as little as possible so as to retain what I can of their nutrients and let the flavors mingle with time. Even a few hours does incredible things for a soup. Once the soup had heated up to bubbling I went ahead and added everything else but the cheese and cranberry sauce. I let it cool just a bit and stirred the cheese in as I didn't want it to boil which can make it difficult to digest. I gave it a taste, added some parsley and cilantro I had found and then miraculously enough thought it needed something else to bring it up, maybe cut through it a bit and so I eyed that fresh cranberry sauce with its half an orange with zest and blended it in. AHA!

There it was, a pot of soup made of all sorts of leftovers a few new ingredients, spices and herbs. It's been disappearing with great speed.

Chop broccoli and cauliflower to bite sized pieces and combine with other dry ingredients. Mix dressing and be sure it is still a bit creamy, sweet and with a tang. Adjust as necessary. Make sure all salad ingredients are coated, but not sopping. This recipe is best served a couple hours after being dressed and does very well the next day.

Last night was not smooth sailing.. so after I spilled my carrot juice I found aphids on my broccoli... my salad had 2 heads cauliflower and 1 floret broccoli!

Today has been a lot of fun. I was invited to the office of a friend of mine to do a live lunch with everyone there. People had a lot of questions about foods, preparation, buying, detoxing and much else. I was very warmly received and want to thank everyone there for their positive energy and interest in what I am doing.

There was so much information and so many questions that I have started writing another piece to address all of that. The central themes that I will begin outlining for that are:

But had some issues with the preparation, most of which were funny and so I modified a bit. I ended up not having enough carrot juice to make 4x this recipe. I also had very big avocados and not very sweet carrots... I was tired and am still in the process of getting this kitchen setup fine-tuned. This is significant because it led to me spilling some carrot juice which there was already too little of; This then became an issue because the salt measurement in the soup was added based on the original recipe... HAHA, I was a bit of a disaster, but... I went ahead and put the ingredients together anyway, including about: (minus stuff in these!)

I found this to be a little salty, too thick, not sweet enough, not enough character and missing something I wasn't sure of yet. (this is in no way a comment on original recipe as I had not followed it very closely) I looked around and considered possibilities with a mild sort of broken- down-car-on-the-highway desperation; Too thick and too salty meant most likely increasing volume... I was out of carrots which could have been an easy fix... I had a few things that I felt could do it, but only a couple that seemed well in line with the character I wanted; Water I felt was unacceptable.

I pulled 1/3 gallon out and returned to the blender and added an orange... that helped and was even the right color... I added another couple of T ginger juice as well as Lemon Juice and about a cup+ of some very pulpy apple cider that happened to be there... This really started to work, so I returned it to the balance. After a round of tastings with folks I added 1/2 t allspice and 1 t cayenne to bring it around and it was right. The apple cider I used makes it not all raw, but you could do it with fresh, so I call it legal in a pinch. Enjoy!

Fresh water, approx 32 oz depending on the consistency desired and the size of your hands.

Add all dry ingredients except lecithin. Add about half of the water and cream this mixture in a blender or food processor until smooth. add water until desired consistency is reached, add lecithin and blend again. It is ready to serve. Store refrigerated. I use it in chai, coffee or over fruit, with a little thinner version you could use it over cereal, in oatmeal etc.. I imagine you could kefir or otherwise culture it if you were interested.. I've made some nut cheeses and founf they come out sweet without added sugars. Enjoy!

I don't have a food processor currently and the grater available is a bit unimpressive and kinked up so not the easiest tool for trying to tear down cabbage, but I wanted a mix of texture in this ferment so I did some chopping and some grating with 3 1/2 heads of green cabbage. I added some coriander seed, mustard seed, black pepper, cayenne, bit of garlic and some leftover kraut juice for the already developed lactic acid bacterial culture. It's well tamped into a gigantic mason jar with a couple of big outer leaves wrapped on the top of the kraut inside the jar and weighted with another long thin jar of water acting like a plunger. I'll taste this in about a week, though I don't expect it to mature for another few weeks.

The other day I was out at an asian grocery and I saw some firm green Japanese cucumbers in one of the bins. I had been thinking on making some pickles, so I grabbed a few. I had to read up a bit on pickles as my last attempt, though edible, were mushy. I found some notes about mushy pickles and it said very plainly that ripened, yellowing pickles will get mushy, look for firmer, greener fruits with more bumps. Well when I made pickles last year with a friend of mine, we figured, "Huh, these cukes are getting pretty ripe and we won't have time to eat them all. Why don't we make pickles? Isn't that what you do with stuuf to preserve it naturally?". We were partially correct and it did in fact create edible pickles, just not the texture we'd have liked them to be. Not a failure nor a success.

Here I am again, though this time I think I have it half right at least. These cukess I picked up are firmer and greener, but this species doesn't really have bumps? So I cleaned them, took the ends off, halved them all and put them in a 32oz jar half full of brine from a previous live pickle culture. It was a store bought, but live brine, name of Bubbies Kosher Dills. Very good and a fantastic starter. I expect these to take about a month. I'll update when I've tasted them in perhaps a couple of weeks.

A note on cultured foods: In caswe you are not in the know, cultured foods are meant to be alive when you buy them as well as when you eat them. If they've been pasteurized, they're dead, don't bother. Equally, once you are getting ready to eat them, heating them much past 114 F will start to destroy the probiotic culture resident in the ferment, so very important to eat it raw!

Made this today for lunch. If you want to make a dish like this, you do need to think ahead and have your sprouts started. I got these quinoa sprouts going on Friday afternoon and they were ready to go today, so about 2 full days.